About 20 local law enforcement agencies can't generate or access their electronic police records and haven't been able to get to them for almost two weeks.

Greenhills Police Chief Neil Ferdelman said the servers for Pamet software, owned by Securus were hit by what he called a power glitch that took the main server and its backup server offline Oct. 27.

He said while the Carrollton, Texas, company initially said it would be back online in an hour or so, the issue was more difficult to manage than initially thought, and Securus had to send the servers off to have data recovered.

Cincinnati and the Hamilton County Sheriff's Office are not using the system.

Not all are affected by the crash, as some, like Blue Ash, Amberley and Springdale, have their own servers.

Ferdelman said his officers are back to filing reports the old fashioned way: paper and pen.

In Green Township, Lt. Mitch Hill said the server failure has put the paper back in paperwork: all reports and details are now being recorded by hand. He said the Hamilton County Prosecutor's Office also uses the system for data it needs for cases. "We are back to faxing," he said.

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Colerain Township Police Sgt. Ed Cordie said all calls for service are entered into the system. Since the crash, they are being handwritten and all those handwritten records will have to be entered manually once the servers are back online.

Ferdelman and Hill both said the server crash has been more of a headache than anything else. Both said cases in court are still being prosecuted, and reports are being recorded. When the servers are repaired, both said all of the paperwork generated since Oct. 27 will be entered into the system.

"It's a shame," Ferdelman said. "Because the Pamet system has worked well for us. I think we thought, and they thought redundancies were built in. They weren't. I feel confident they will be when the servers are restored."

Springfield Police Chief Rob Browder said his department has used the system since 2006, but his confidence in its reliability is shaken by a two-week outage.

"I have people coming in for accident reports for insurance for crashes that happened before the server went down and we can't help them. They are having trouble getting their cars fixed. It's not good."

He said a number of the department are considering a meeting with a vendor for another system. "I understand a server going down for a couple hours. Even a day," he said. "Two weeks? That's just unacceptable."

Securus issued a statement when called by The Enquirer.

"Pamet, an Archonix company, understands the urgency and delicacy of the situation and have been in constant communication with all affected parties," it said. "We are prepared to restore access to our systems within the next 48 hours while we continue to work tirelessly with our technology experts to recover all data."